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Serious Sam Remake Coming In Fall
Majesco Entertainment has announced that Serious Sam: The First Encounter HD will be coming to Xbox Live this fall, and to the PC sometime later. It's a remake of the original game using the CroTech engine, and it will support up to four player co-op. Joystiq has some screenshots, including a comparison between the old graphics and the new look. "The textures are sharper and cleaner than before. The original's perfectly flat lawns are now replaced with individual blades of grass — and look at that foliage, rendered with some classy Crysis-styled soft focus. Notice the dynamic shadows over our pumpkin-wearing, chainsaw-wielding friend? Now, imagine this level of detail on hundreds of on-screen enemies."
Let's try to be serious with the posts, okay folks?
I hope they only touched up the graphics, and didn't mess with the gameplay at all. SS:FE and SS:SE were just great games, I had a lot of fun, specially in co-op. For SS2 they made changes to the gameplay, to make it a bit more "modern", and that didn't work out at all. So I hope they left the gameplay as it was.
I wish more games would take the 'more is more' approach to enemies that Serious Sam did. I loved the HUGE SCREAMING HORDES of bad guys that would try to zerg you down. It was a nice change of pace from, say, Unreal's 'kill a bad guy, which triggers another bad guy, because the engine chokes and dies if two mobs are on the screen at the same time'. And I liked Unreal. More games should have more swarms.
I'm a little concerned that the marketing has exceeded the technology here. The entire point of the SS games (as contrasted with SS2) was to swamp you with goons.
So... where are they?
The screenshots look purty, but if I were writing SS:FE:HD, then I'd start with a screen full of goons, and tailor the detail to keep the framerate up. Showing a couple of high detail models, wow, it's like they're demoing the exact opposite of SS.
I have a feeling that somebody's going to be working a lot of overtime to deliver on that promise, and it's not going to be the marketing guy.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Remake some old awesome game with NEW GRAPHICS! It will sell well! not...
So now they want people to upgrade their graphics cards... not for some awesome gotta have it brand new title? no.. now they want you to upgrade for some OLD ass game!
Remake? So they couldnt come up with any new content after the total mess that was the last serious sam game? well. ok. thats a given. since the original two awesome ones were made by people who no longer work for croteam.
And only 4 player co-op? Um... the old game would handle way more people than that.
Could it sound anymorel like a desperate attempt to cash in on something that WAS good?
And what made SS2 such a disappointment? Numbers of enemies. Simple as that. Screw graphics and pretty, I want to be swarmed by mindless, soulless, expendable goons to mow down. THAT is Serious Sam! Let the killing be in the 1000 BPMs (bodies-per-minute).
And for god's sake, gimme more than 4 people to play with. 8 was already great. 16 would be awesome. 32 would be just too awesome to not flood the keyboard with ... erh ... coke. Me and my buddies take on the world. Ain't that what every blood-lusting boy dreamt of?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Serious Sam was never about being the prettiest. We loved the first two because of the game play. You ran, you killed, and you either kept killing at a brutal pace or you were overwhelmed by the insane number of enemies. That was it. No complex puzzles. No crazy strategy. Just run and gun and have a blast. Nobody cared that the lawn was flat because we knew if there was a lot of detail, the game would never have run at all. Way too many enemies on the screen to have serious levels of detail.
Now, many years later, computers are faster, we have more memory and all that, but the point of the game hasn't changed. With SS2 they changed things and nobody liked it. For me the main problem was it locked up a lot. I didn't have that problem at all with the first two. I still have the first two and I'd much rather play them as is than prettier versions of the same thing.
Why not instead take the original engine and make a Third Encounter? And then a Fourth Encounter? We LOVED the first two and two more games just like those, different maps and what have you, but same exact style of game play, would be awesome!
How is it that one careless match can start a forest fire, but it takes a whole box to start a campfire?
Not even close to being better than SS1+SE. It suffers from consolitis.
We've been seeing this decline in the games industry for years with the ever-increasing numbers of derivative sequels and even different titles from different companies being copies of each other.
The "remake" is exactly the way Hollywood has gone with movies - now they've all run out of ideas, they just redo the old stuff.
Incidentally, these comments come from a big Serious Sam fan - I still play the First and Second Encounters regularly on LAN parties with friends, it really doesn't need any graphical improvements. Especially because having a few older PCs kicking around the house, it's not always necessary for friends to bring PCs over themselves since one of my older PCs will run it (as well as Doom, Duke Nukem, Quake and a few others).
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.